David Herman
Jewish American Writers in the ‘60s
David Herman Jewish American Writers in the ‘60s | 02.15.24
- Hello again. My name is David Herman and over these weeks I’m, I’ll be talking about Jewish American writing since the second World War. Last week, I talked about one of the main reasons that Jewish American writers broke into the mainstream after 1945. The date is crucial. Writing about the war enabled writers like Saul Bellow and Arthur Miller and Norman Mailer and Joseph Heller, all pretty much of the same generation, to become major writers. They wrote about a subject that touched so many people in America, so many families in America. But significantly, though these works included some Jewish characters, the voice in these works was not noticeably Jewish. By the sixties, three things had changed dramatically. First, Jewish American writers like Bellow and Roth in particular, had established themselves as major American writers. Above all, they wrote about Jewish characters and found a new Jewish voice, unlike anything seen before in American literature. Funny, smart, sometimes angry, very topical, very thoughtful, full of references to great European and American literature. And they engaged with their time again, that this time they engaged with the 1960s.
Let me read you a passage from Saul Bellow’s, “Mr. Sammler’s Planet”, in which Sammler is, really encounters the sixties in a big and bad way. Hey old man! In the silence, Mr. Sammler drew down his tinted spectacles, seeing this person with his effective eye. Oh man, you quoted Orwell before. Yes? You quoted him to say that British radicals were all protected by the Royal Navy. Did Orwell say that British radicals were protected by the Royal Navy? Yes, I believe he did say that. That’s a lot of shit. Sammler could not speak. Orwell was a fink. He was a sick counter revolutionary. It’s good he died when he did and what you’re saying is shit. Turning to the audience, extending violent arms and raising his palms like a Greek dancer, he said, “Why do you listen to this old shit? What has he got to tell you? His balls are dry, he’s dead. He can’t come.” Sammler later thought that voices had been raised on his side. Someone had said, shame, exhibitionist, but no one really tried to defend him. Most of the young people seemed to be against him. The shouting sounded hostile and he was not so much personally offended by the event as struck by the will to offend. What a passion to be real, but real was also brutal. And the acceptance of excrement as a standard, how extraordinary. Youth together with the idea of sexual potency, all this confused sex, excrement, militancy, explosiveness, abusiveness, tooth showing Barbary eight howling.
This was actually based on a true experience of Bellow’s encounter with the new left in California in the spring of 1968. So welcome to the sixties. Some of the key Jewish American texts during the sixties included Philip Roth’s breakthrough book of short stories, “Goodbye Columbus”. Saul Bellow’s great novel, perhaps his greatest, “Herzog”, published in '64. Arthur Miller’s plays “After the Fall”, and “Incident at Vichy”, his first play since 1955, and these were performed in 1964. Susan Sontag’s famous essay, “Notes on Camp” published in Partisan Review, then the leading Jewish American literary publication. “The Fiddler on the Roof”, of course, which opened in '64 and ran through till 1972. Irving Howe’s famous essay on Henry Roth’s “Call it Sleep” in the New York Times book review, which launched or relaunched, rediscovered Henry Roth for a whole new generation. Then in '65 you get Woody Allen’s first screenplay, “What’s New Pussycat?” Neil Simon’s play, “The Odd Couple” filmed in '68. Bernard Malamud’s, “The Fixer” in '66, which won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer. Cynthia Ozick’s first novel also published in '66. And Susan Sontag’s, famous book of essays, “Against Interpretation”.
Then in '67 Norman Mailers, “Why Are we in Vietnam?” And in '68, Mailer’s books of reportage, “The Armies of the Night” and “Miami and the Siege of Chicago”. And then in '69, Philip Roth’s most famous book, I suppose, “Portnoy’s Complaint”. And then in '70, Saul Bellow’s “Mr. Sammler’s Planet”. It’s an extraordinary golden age, a kind of coming of time for a whole generation coming of age for a whole generation. One of the things is there are two kinds of 1960s in some of the history lecturers you may have been listened to over the last weeks may have made clear. We think of the sixties in America as one thing, one sort of chunk of time. But I think that’s not quite right. I think there are two 1960s in America. In the early sixties, you have the beats, you have folk, you have civil rights, you have the continuation of the late fifties. You have the Civil Rights Movement. Allen Ginsberg writing “Howell”, and other poems. Beatniks and Jack Kerouac. You have Lena Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim writing “West Side Story” in '57, “Goodbye Columbus” in '59. Betty Friedan, “The Feminine Mystique” in 1963. Peter Paul and Mary record “Blowing In the Wind”. Martin Luther King’s, “I Have a Dream” speech.
And then in '64, Saul Bellow’s, “Herzog”, which interestingly has almost nothing at all on race. Then you get the late sixties, which is what we usually think we mean by the sixties. Anti-Vietnam, LB.J, Nixon, the Rolling Stones, riots in LA and in Chicago, assassinations. And this runs up really into the seventies and overlaps just as the late fifties overlaps of the early sixties to form one block of time. So the late sixties runs into the early seventies and creates a second block, which is what we usually think of as the sixties. The Black Panther Party was formed in Oakland, California in '66. Sergeant Pepper came out in '67. In '68 you get the Tet Offensive, the Chicago riots, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King assassinated, student uprisings of Columbia and all across America. You get Bellow’s first encounter of the new left in San Francisco in '68, and the encounter of Jewish intellectuals in general with the new left at Columbia University, which sends a lot of Jewish writers and intellectuals to the right, Bellow in particular. Lionel Trilling, the famous literary critic, Irving Howe, Daniel Bell, Norman Podhoretz, who were all sort of started out as kind of liberals, if not actually leftists. And what they saw on the campuses and on the news programmes in the evening really sent them screaming to the right in many cases. And this affected their visions of America, particularly Bellow and particularly Roth, as well. And then in '69, Roth publishes “Portnoy’s Complaint”.
You get Woodstock, you get Altamont, you get the Days of Rage in Chicago. It’s a very different kind of time, very violent, very frightening kind of America. And in “Mr. Sammler’s planet” in 1970, Sammler witnesses a black pickpocket. It’s a very controversial, perhaps the most controversial scene in all of Saul Bellow’s writing. Sammler witnesses a black pickpocket on a crowded Broadway bus. The thief, aware of having been noticed, follows back, Sammler back to his apartment building and exposes his penis to him. A large and purple uncircumcised thing. A tube, a snake, writes Bellow. To Sammler, the great black beast, as Bellow calls him, is the embodiment of a new barbarism. Sexual niger hood for everyone. James Atlas, Bellow’s biographer called. This is a passage that comes to haunt Bellow’s reputation in later years when people began to criticise his attitudes to women and to black people. And it’s something that I think Bellow’s reputation still has not yet recovered from, perhaps never will recover from. So you get two very different responses to the sixties. You get those who embrace the sixties, key figures like Norman Mailer, Susan Sontag, Alan Ginsburg, and to some extent, Philip Roth. And then those who were appalled by the sixties, Bellow, especially “Mr. Sammler’s Planet”, especially that particular scene. Race, crime, and a kind of irrationality that Bellow found completely contemptible. And not just Bellow, but a whole generation of not so right as perhaps as intellectuals.
But whether they were for the sixties or whether they were against the sixties, both sides of the argument gave a fantastic guide and insight to the time in America in particular. Interestingly, not internationally, although Susan Sontag famously went to Hanoi, they didn’t really engage with much that was happening around the rest of the world. So for example, Philip Roth later during the 1970s and '80s became fascinated by East Europe and what was happening in East Europe under Stalinism and launched the careers in translation of many leading East European writers, but not so much in the sixties. So you get with these writers a real front row seat on what’s happening in America. Mailer wrote on the March on the Pentagon and the Chicago Days. Susan Sontag took part in the City Hall Debate with Jermaine Greer and Norman Mailer and went to Cuba and to Hanoi. Ginsburg hung out with the Beatles and famously appeared in a film with Bob Dylan, the young Bob Dylan. Secondly, you get a very different kind of take on the sixties, mainly with Bellow and Roth, which is about race, criminality, and particularly the decline of the old Jewish neighbourhoods, in Chicago in Bellow’s case.
In New York, New Jersey where Roth grew up and where much of his writing about America takes place. In general, you could say the late fifties and the sixties was a time when you got a new Jewish visibility. Jews suddenly exploded onto the scene. Yes as we saw in last week, looking at some of the war novels, Arthur Miller broke into Broadway. Bellow wrote his first novels. Roth wrote his, published his first book of short stories in '59. So they were beginning to emerge, but the real explosion happens in the sixties. You get, there’s a famous essay by Leslie Feeler, the Jewish regulatory critic in his book of essays, “Waiting for the End”, called “Zion as Main Street”. And what you get is a sense of suddenly, not just the Jews have made it to Main Street, but they’re actually defining what Main Street is in the late fifties and sixties, in all kinds of parts of American culture. You get the discovery of the Holocaust people. After the long silence of the late forties and fifties, you suddenly get “The Diary of Anne Frank”, published in '59, and the film and sorry, the film comes out in '59, the book came out in '52. “Exodus” comes out in 1960. “Elie Gazelle’s Knight” is translated. Andre Schwartz Bart’s, “The Last of the Just” is published.
Then you get the film in 1961, “Judgement of Nuremberg”. Primo Levi’s, “Survival in Auschwitz”, which is a trans, the American edition of “If This Is a Man”. You get the “Eichmann Trial” with Hannah Arendt’s famous reportage in the New Yorker, later published as “Argument in Jerusalem” in 1962. You get Jerzy Kosiński’s, “The Painted Bird” in 1965. Raul Hilberg’s seminal historical work, “The destruction of the European Shoes” in 1960. Interestingly, Saul Bellow, who hasn’t had much to say during the forties and fifties about the Holocaust, he visits the Polish death camps for the first time. And he writes in a letter to his editor, “I can’t tell you what an impression Poland makes on me. It’s too deep, as deep as death and more familiar than I can admit at the top of my mind. It’s family history.” Not that any of Bellow’s family were caught up in the Holocaust, but nevertheless, this sense of connection to the biggest event of his lifetime. Philip Roth in 1959, the year before had already published perhaps his greatest single short story, “Eli, the Fanatic” in his collection, “Goodbye Columbus”, which is an extraordinary encounter with the Holocaust.
And then finally in 1970, Bellow’s, “Mr. Sammler’s Planet” is the first time that in a major novel, he encounters the Holocaust through the experience of his, one of his major creations, Mr. Sammler. Then you have Jewish American writing, which suddenly takes off from the late fifties. Malamud’s, “The Assistant”, Bellow’s, “Henderson the Rain King”, Roth’s, “Goodbye Columbus”, Heller’s, “Catch 22”, Bellow’s, “Herzog”. Literature suddenly in America is getting more Jewish. Bear in mind, it really was not. If you think of before the war, the great American writers were people like Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos. They were not Jewish writers. There were interesting Jewish writers, underrated Jewish writers, but that’s not the same thing as saying that they were major Jewish writers. What you get from the late fifties, right through the sixties and the seventies is Jewish American writers winning major prizes, becoming famous, becoming front page news, appearing on chat shows, selling in hundreds of thousands.
Books like “Herzog”, “Mr. Sammler’s Planet”, “Goodbye Columbus”, “Portnoy’s Complaint”, become hugely successful and make the names and reputations of these writers. The contrast, if you look at something like “Catch 22”, a great novel, and it made Joseph Heller very famous, but it’s not a Jewish novel. “Herzog”, now there’s a Jewish novel. Came out only three years after “Catch 22”. It is full of Yiddish words. It is full of memories of the old country, of immigrant life, of shyster lawyers. And then you get “Portnoy’s Complaint”, more Yiddish, and it actually ends in Israel. “Mr. Sammler’s Planet”, There’s a whole references to the six day war in Israel, and of course a famous scene about the Holocaust. Thirdly, there’s a new generation of Jewish American standup comedians, Lenny Bruce, Mort Sal, Shelley Berman, Mike Nichols, and Elaine May, Tom Lara, Woody Allen, whose first screenplay is filmed in 1965.
You get what the Cambridge University Press companion to Jewish American literature calls “Yiddi-tude”, a kind of new satirical take on America, an outsider’s point of view of America, mocking the affluence, the right wing world of the Eisenhower years, of the Nixon years. Donald Weber writes in the Cambridge University Press, “Companion”, “By the time the urban neurotic self mocking comedy of Bruce, and a few years later, Woody Allen appeared on the scene, the Jewish voice had fully arrived.” And you see this in comedy, you see this on TV shows, and you find it in writing. One of the crucial reasons for the success of writers like Bellow and Roth in particular, and Heller as well, is they’re so funny and their dialogue crackles with energy. This is very different from a writer like Bernard Malamud. If you had to ask, why is it that Malamud despite the respectful reviews, despite the success and critical acclaim, never really made it in the way that Bellow and Roth did?
One crucial reason is he’s just not as funny, not as alive as Bellow and Roth. Then you get Israel, of course. You get “Exodus”, you get the Six-Day War, you get the “Yom Kippur”. So those years between the publication and the film of “Exodus” and the “Yom Kippur War” in 1973, those sort of 15 years or thereabouts, changed America’s relationship not just to Israel, but to Jews and to Jewish writers. And then you get the Jewish new wave films of the sixties. You get “The Graduate” in 1967 where every key figure involved in the making of that film is Jewish. And there is a crucial, I don’t know if you remember the opening of “The Graduate”, but there’s an astonishing moment where to the sound of Simon and Garfunkel’s, “The Sound of Silence”, Dustin Hoffman, the Dustin Hoffman character, the star of the film, arrives at LA International Airport and he’s sharp in profile. And this is a crucial decision by the people involved in the making of the film because Dustin Hoffman has an enormous nose.
Now, one crucial thing about Jewish American movie stars is that they did two things to become acceptable and to fit into the mainstream. They changed their names and anglicised their names, and they changed their appearance. They did not own up to having big noses. And until Barbara Streisand, they did not own up to having frizzy Jewish hair. So for Dustin Hoffman to stand there in profile during this long opening sequence, as he arrives on and he’s on the escalator at LA International Airport, to “The Sound of Silence”, to see that big Jewish-ness, this was an extraordinary… It sounds ridiculous. 50 years later, I appreciate. This was an extraordinary statement at the time, both by the director, Mike Nichols and by all those involved with the film. Then a year later, you get Barbara Streisand in “Funny Girl”, could not be more Jewish. You get the producers Mel Brooks, 1968, Mel Brooks and Gene Wilder. You get “I Love You, Alice B. Toklas” in '68. The film of “Goodbye Columbus”, Philip Roth’s novella. You get “Where’s Poppa?” with George Segal in 1970, and at the same time you get the explosion of Jewish writers and TV stars on American TV comedy.
The Jews took over American TV comedy. This started in the early fifties with Sid Caesar in “Your Show of Shows” and then “Caesar’s Hour” in the mid fifties. Whose writers included, now, listen to this. Woody Allen, Mel Brooks, Larry Gelbart, who later wrote “Mash”, Carl Reiner, father of Rob Reiner, and Neil Simon, great Broadway writer. You get Phil Silvers with “Sgt. Bilko”. You get “The Dick Van Dyke Show” from 1960 to '66. You get “Get Smart”, created by Mel Brooks and Buck Henry, who later wrote “The Graduate”. So Jews took over primetime American TV. Bear in mind before this, the most popular shows on American TV were suburban sitcoms and westerns. They could not have been more goyish, if you don’t mind me saying. And that changed with this new generation of writers and producers. You also get crucially, a lively, opinionated group of Jewish critics and public intellectuals. Irving Howe found it’s dissent in 1954. Susan Sontag arrives in New York in 1959. Norman Podhoretz starts editing commentary in 1960. Leslie Feedler writes “Love and Death” in the American novel. Susan Sontag writes her famous pathbreaking essay, “Notes on Camp” in '64. Feedler writes his essay, “Zion as Main Street” in '64. Alfred Kazen, Irving Howe, Sontag writes a book of essays against interpretation.
Suddenly, smart Jews are everywhere and they’re in particular in the leading literary magazines in New York of the sixties and seventies and from then on. “Partisan Review”, the “New York Review of Books”, edited by Bob Silvers and Barbara Epstein. And you get Jewishness as foregrounded. It’s not sort of hidden away somewhere. It’s right staring you in the face, like Dustin Hoffman’s nose. You get the Yiddish in Saul Bellow. Until I read “Herzog” in 1974 for the first time, I had never read a famous novel which had Yiddish words and phrases, at ludicrous shimeji. You get Ginsburg’s, “Kaddish”. You get “Fiddler on the Roof”. Boy do you get “Fiddler on the Roof” in 1964. Saul Bellow writes to his friend Keith Botsford, “For the first time I’m trying to ascertain what my Jewish parentage and upbringing really signify.” A new generation of Jewish American writers and screenwriters are trying to come to terms with their Jewish past and their background.
On the one hand, his biographer James Atlas wrote, “He long desperately for assimilation to be unambiguously an American. On the other, he found in his ethnic past an anchor, a story, a mental homeland.” Finally, Jews were really at home in the sixties. “Vietnam”, Joseph Heller writes one of the great Vietnam novels, even though he’s not actually about Vietnam, but it’s fame came because it caught the pulse of America during the Vietnam years. Noam Chomsky was one of the leading critics of the Vietnam War. Norman Mailer wrote the most famous accounts of the riots, anti-Vietnam riots. You get sex in “Portnoy’s Complaint” in Joseph Heller’s “Something Happened”. You get blacks and the inner city in “Mr. Sammler’s Planet”, in Saul Bellow’s stories, “Mosby’s Memoirs”, in Philip Roth’s later writing, perhaps more than at the time. In Joseph Heller’s “Good as Gold”. Norman Mailer’s famous essay on “The White Negro”. Nixon, perhaps the biggest political figure of this whole period and Kissinger, both feature in Philip Roth’s writing in Joseph Heller’s, “Good as Gold”. And Kennedy, of course, is a big subject for Norman Mailer.
So they knew something big was happening in American public life, political life, cultural life. And they really engaged with it in a way that the writers that we looked at in the 1900s, '20s, '30s, did not. They were preoccupied with Jewish themes, but not mainstream American themes. They weren’t writing about Roosevelt, they weren’t writing about the New Deal, they weren’t writing about anti-Semitism in America. They were writing about immigration, they were writing about sweatshops, they were writing about tenements. That’s not the same thing. The other thing you get with Heller and Bellow in particular is of more literary issue. Realism with a twist. You get this mix of mainstream realism, Heller writing about the war, Bellow in 1950s, '60s, Chicago, New York. But you get something else as well. Modernism. These are smart writers. They’ve read a lot. They’ve thought a lot about writing and literature. They’ve been influenced by great European writers.
It is no coincidence that Moses Elkanah Herzog to give Herzog his full name, is a minor character in James Joyce’s, “Ulysses”. It’s a sort of little calling card if you like, to modernism. Instead of having a plot, these guys circle around, these books circle around, appearing as if they don’t have a centre, and they move towards a resolution which isn’t a resolution. “Herzog”, for example, begins at the beginning, keeps moving forwards and backwards in time, often in a single paragraph. And we end up back at the beginning, sort of, though it’s more complicated than that. Where have we ended up exactly? Where are we now at the end? Where is Herzog? He’s in his house in the Berkshires, in Louisville, Massachusetts. But where is that? It’s a metaphor for him. It’s rambling, derelict, broken down in a mess, just as he is.
But can he be, is he sorted out at the end? Has he come to terms? Has he found some kind of resolution? Has the book found some kind of resolution? Is it also a metaphor for the book? Rambling, derelict, broken down, but basically solid, beautiful, important. Is it some other kind of space? Arthur Miller’s plays, for example, where homes and houses are a kind of space for guilt, for sexuality in a view from the bridge. So we’re back at the beginning and yet we’re not. And “Catch 22”, as I said a little bit last week, does exactly the same. It begins at the beginning, but at various points we find ourselves back at the beginning. We haven’t really moved forward at all. And again, at the end, we’re back with with the Chaplain and Yossarian, just like at the beginning, except we’re not, because we’ve gone on this extraordinary voyage, which Joseph Heller takes us. Then there’s letters, the question of letters in these books. This is already an issue in Henry Roth’s masterpiece, “Call it Sleep”, in the Prologue. Did the husband write to his wife? Do birth certificates matter?
Herzog, as you may know, is constantly writing letters. It’s in a kind of compulsive way to the great, the good, the famous, the writers. Only at the end when the letters are about to stop, does he make contact with people. Yossarian too, writes Joseph Heller, wrote letters to everyone he knew. The book, “Catch 22” is full of letters and memos, but no contact or communication. There’s also a sort of darker side to all this. Herzog’s letters are a kind of sign of his madness and breakdown. Yossarian, similarly. While in the end both books say something very modernist about writing and books and letters and all forms of writing, those don’t really make the contact with the most important things in life, which according to these novels are love. It was love at first sight, says Yossarian. There’s Herzog’s love for his children, his family, Ramona. Secondly, there are bodies. Thirdly, there is death. Herzog’s, extraordinary memories of his mother’s death. These are books which are suspicious in a very modernist way about writing and meaning. And ultimately, that’s what they’re about.
But here’s the clincher of the deal. They’re readable, they’re accessible, they’re full of lively detail, full of realism. They’re smart, full of literary references, and they’re comic, but they’re readable, accessible, realistic. People bought them in the hundreds of thousands, not because they were necessarily speaking to their own experience in the way that they brought “Armies of the Night” as a wartime novel in 1948, just after the war. But because they’re saying they’re speaking about urban life, midlife crises, things which happened to people, but in a very comic, fast-paced, lively kind of way. What holds them and what holds the characters, particularly perhaps Herzog more than anyone, but Sammler also is the past. In Herzog, it’s his immigrant childhood in Montreal. “How he doted on his memories”, writes Bellow. As his family, in the description of his family in Herzog.
“As for my late unlucky father, Jay Herzog, he was not a big man. One of the small boned, Herzog’s finely made, round headed, key, nervous, handsome in his frequent bursts of temper he slapped his son swiftly with both hands. He did everything quickly, neatly, with skillful Eastern European flourishes. Combing his hair, buttoning his shirts, dropping his bone handled razors, sharpening pencils on the ball of his thumb, holding a loaf of bread to his breast and slicing towards himself, tying parcels with tight little knots, jotting like an artist in his account book. There, each cancelled page was covered with a carefully drawn X. The I’s, the ones and sevens carried bars and streamers. They were like penance in the wind of failure. First, Father Hertzog failed in St. Petersburg. He got away because he was nervy, hasty, obstinate, rebellious. He came to Canada where his sister Zippora Yaffa was living. In 1913, he bought a piece of land near Valleyfield, Quebec and failed as a farmer. Then he came to town and failed as a baker. Failed in the dry goods business, failed as jobber, failed as a sack manufacturer in the war when no one else failed, he failed as a junk dealer. Then he became a marriage broker and failed, too short tempered and blunt. And now he was failing as a bootlegger on the run from the Provincial Liquor Commission, making a bit of a living.”
In one of Bellow’s great short stories, “The old System” published in his collection of short stories, “Mosby’s Memoirs”, he writes, “Dr. Brown had given up his afternoon to the hopeless pleasure of thinking affectionately about his dad.” In “Portnoy’s Complaint”, Philip Roth, right towards the end of the novel. It is a great novel and is loved perhaps for the wrong things, really. “I am impaled again upon the long ago what was, what will never be. The door slams. She’s gone. My salvation, my kin, and I’m whimpering on the floor with my memories!”, in block capitals, exclamation. “My endless childhood!”, exclamation mark, “Which I won’t relinquish or which won’t relinquish me, which is it?” In “Mr. Sammler’s Planet”, Bellow writes of Sammler. He’s on an old system. That phrase again. So in “Herzog” you get, and it is arguably I think, Bellow’s masterpiece. There are some people who champion “The Adventures of Augie March”, which we’ll look at next week, but I think “Herzog” is really his masterpiece.
So you get this preoccupation with text, with time. He had been eight years old in the children’s ward at the Royal Victoria Hospital, Montreal, when he learned those words, how he doted on his memories. And the book, goes sort of decent in a curious way. It moves through time and it also moves through space. On page seven we’re told, “He had carried this valise”, this briefcase, “…from New York to Martha’s Vineyard, but returned from the vineyard immediately. Two days later, he flew to Chicago. And from Chicago he went to a village in western Massachusetts.”, where the book ends hundreds of pages later. So we’re on page seven and we’re basically told what’s going to happen. That is the plot of the novel. But of course, it’s about so many other things. It’s a journey through time. It’s a journey through space. But it’s also a vocation of a life, of a culture, Jewish immigrant culture. “I was really taking Herzog at a moment of crisis”, Bellow wrote, “And putting on and removing the masks he had used throughout his life. The scholar, the Jew, the husband, the father, the lover, the romantic avenger, the intellectual, all the rest of that.”
He does something extraordinary with the creation of Herzog. On the one hand, Herzog is ludicrous, ridiculous, all these crazy letters he’s writing to famous thinkers in the past. At the same time, he’s a deeply moving figure. Any, perhaps the book speaks more maybe to men readers than to women readers. But there is something deeply moving of his evocation and description, not just of the midlife crisis where Herzog is as the book begins and indeed ends. But it’s also an evocation of his whole life, from his immigrant childhood to the present, his present. And then of course there is endless battles with what he calls the reality instructors. “He’d chosen to be dreamy instead. And the Sharpies had cleaned him out.”, we’re told on page nine. “What a beating he had taken.”, we’re told on page 10. “That suffering joker.”, one of Bellow’s great phrases about Herzog, page 17. So what has meaning in Herzog? The soul, the heart, “depths of feeling”, as Bellow calls them. The self, “The living man…”, Bellow said in his Jefferson lectures, “…Is preoccupied with such questions as who he is, what he lives for, what he’s so keenly and interminably yearning for, what his human essence is.”
Human essence is a big phrase for Saul Bellow, more than for any other Jewish American writer. “Interminably yearning”, is a big Bellow phrase as well. And I think that’s why Bellow perhaps more did speak to readers in the fifties, sixties, seventies, eighties than he does now. I don’t know. Maybe he still does. “It is this sense of what people yearn for, what their essence is, what it means to be a human being. The real self unknown is hidden, a sunken power in us. The true identity lies deep, very deep.”, Bellow said in his Hopwood lecture, “Where do we go from Here? The Future of Fiction”. Deep, the depths. These are big words for Saul Bellow. He’s not a, well, he is a surface man because he’s such a brilliant writer. He describes and brings to life, cities, restaurants, tastes, smells, the look of people. But he’s really interested in the depths of human beings. And that of course brings us to death. The scene with his mother. I love, by the way, the old penguin editions with the Ben Shan on the covers. They are always the best.
Not because they have introductions 'cause they don’t, but the drawings by Ben Shan are just fantastic. “The week of her death, also in winter…” He’s writing about, Bellow’s writing about Herzog’s mother. “This happened in Chicago and Herzog was 16 years old, nearly a young man. It occurred on the west side. She was dying. Evidently, Moses wanted no part of that. He was already a free thinker. Darwin and Heckle and Spencer were old stuff to him, he and Zelinski….” What had happened to that gilded youth? “…Disdained, the branch library. They bought thick books of all sorts out out of the 39 cent barrel at Walgreens. The world as will and idea and the decline of the west. What was going on? Herzog knitted his brows to force his memory to work. Papa had the night job and slept days, you had to tiptoe through the house. If you woke him, he was furious. That was a frightful January. Streets coated with steely ice, the moon lay on the glaze snow of the backyards where clumsy lumber porches threw their shadows.
Under the kitchen was the furnace from the janitor stoke the fire, his apron, a burlap sack, his negro beard, gritty with the soft coal. When I looked away from that dense print and its insidious pedantry, my heart infected with ambition and the bacteria of vengeance, Mama was entering the kitchen. Seeing light under the door, she came the whole length of the house from the sick room. Her hair had to be cut during her illness and this made those eyes hard to recognise. Oh no. The shortness of her hair nearly made their message simpler. My son, this is death. "I saw the light”, she said. “What are you doing up so late?” But the dying for themselves have given up hours. She only pitied me, her orphan. Understood I was a gesture maker, ambitious, full, thought I would need my eyesight and my strength on a certain day of reckoning. A few days afterwards when she had lost the power to speak, she was still trying to comfort Moses. But as when he knew she was breathless from trudging with his sled in Montreal that would not get up, he came into her room when she was dying, holding his school books and began to say something to her.
But she lifted up her hands and showed him her fingernails. They were blue. As he stared, she slowly began to nod her head up and down as if to say, “That’s right, Moses. I’m dying now.” He sat by the bed. Presently, she began to stroke his hand. She did this as well as she could. Her fingers had lost their flexibility. Under the nails they seemed to him to be turning already into the blue loam of graves. She had begun to change into earth. He did not dare to look, but listened to the runners of children’s sleds in the street and the grating of peddlers wheels on the knotted ice, the horse call of the apple peddler and the rattle of his steel stale. The steam whispered in the vent. The curtain was drawn. In the corridor outside magistrate’s court, he thrust both hands into his trouser pockets and drew up his shoulders. His teeth were on edge, a bookish Callow Boy. And then he thought, it was the funeral, how Willie cried in the chapel. It was his brother Willie after all about the tender heart. But Moses shook his head to be rid of such thoughts. The more he thought, the worse his vision of the past.“
Bellow’s has become a very controversial figure, 60 years now, after that incredible book is published. He’s been accused of racism, misogyny. He no longer speaks to a younger generation. A few years ago I was at Barnes and Noble, the big Barnes and Noble on the up west side and I went to see if they had any copies of his letters yet. And I said, "Do you have Saul Bellow’s letters?” And the young sales assistant in his early twenties, who barely been born when Bellow died, said, “How do you spell that?” And I said, “Do you mean Saul Bellow or letters?” It was not a happy encounter. It somehow signified how in the heart of Saul Bellow’s world, the upper west side of New York City, he seemed out of date, obsolete. And yet you read that passage about death of Herzog’s mother, like many of the passages in that extraordinary book, and you think this is really timeless writing. This is what great literature is. And I suppose one of the problems with some of the earlier writers we were looking at before Christmas, is that they’re very good writers.
They write better than anybody about the immigrant experience, the Jewish immigrant experience in America. They’re not great writers. They didn’t produce shelves full of great books like Bellow, Roth, or even a few great books like Heller and Mailer and Mal, or great plays like Miller and Mamet. This moment in the sixties was not just about the drama of riots and demonstrations and Kennedy and Nixon and race and… It was about the moment when Jewish American writers found their voice as great, great writers. And next week I will be looking, before I reply to your questions, I will remind you that my next talk will be next Wednesday, the 21st of February, between 7 and 8:00 PM UK time. Between 2 and 3 US time, Canadian time, on the specifically Jewish voices of these writers. And I look forward to that. And in the meantime, let me try and answer some of your questions.
Q&A and Comments
Monty’s iPad, my old friend Monty’s iPad.
Q: “What about Irving Schulman known for his novel, "The Amboy Dukes” a cult book? Comedian Lenny Bruce, or are they not really of the sixties?“ A: Well, Lenny Bruce is very much of the sixties. Irving Schulman, I’m ashamed to say, Monty’s iPad, I don’t know and I don’t know "The Amboy Dukes”. And this is what happens to me every week, that people say, “Well what about this writer? And what about this book? How have you not mentioned this book and this writer?” And there we are. I mention the writers and the books that matter to me, I’m ashamed to say, but I’m always grateful for your suggestions.
Jeff makes a very good point.
Q: “What about the Catskills Jewish comedians of the fifties?” A: Absolutely. You are absolutely right. And many of the great Jewish comedians started out in these Jewish resort places in the Catskills, in upstate New York, and put their teeth there and then went on to become big TV stars or big movie stars.
Q: Louise Sweet. “Not about Jewish writers, but who made the menorah behind you? And is it a carving wood or clay?” A: Do you know, I don’t know what it’s made of. It’s not a menorah. Well, it’s a kind of menorah, but it’s, I don’t know if you can see it properly. Oh dear. If I hold the top. It’s a, if you can see it, it’s a group of Klezmer musicians. And I bought it at a Jewish store on the Upper West side many, many years ago because I loved it. I love Klezmer and I love menorahs. So there we are. The two came together. But thank you for asking.
And Louise says, “And Bellow at the University of Chicago did seem to have a persistent connection with Jewish life. His relatives who lived in Chicago as well as Canada, Yiddish as well as the Committee on social thought.” The committee on social thought is a very important experience for Bellow. And Chicago, well, Chicago is his kind of town. It’s where he grew up. He was born in Montreal, but he grew up in Chicago and later he moves to Boston towards the end of his life where he married his, I’ve lost track, fourth or fifth wife, and taught at Boston University towards the end of his life. And the committee on social thought in Chicago, Chicago for him is the embodiment of a certain kind of America. It’s hustling, it’s aggressive, it’s full of tough guys. But there’s also the committee on social thought at the University of Chicago where Bellow taught for many years, along with people like Alan Bloom and sort of leading world figures in the world of thought and ideas. And this is around the time that Bellow, when he returns to Chicago in the eighties and nineties and returns to writing about Chicago, this is when he’s really moved to the right. And he describes probably better than anyone except possibly Philip Roth when he is writing about New York, New Jersey.
What has happened to American cities and what has happened to American cities to cut a long story short, is the Jews have moved out. These are, remember where the cities where Bellow and Roth grew up. The Jews have moved out, the immigrants have moved out, and the blacks have moved in. And this is another part of Bellow’s, the dark side of Bellow’s reputation because he, for him, this is a kind of barbarism and indeed, anyone who has visited parts of New York, parts of the South Bronx, parts of Harlem, parts of Brooklyn, parts of… Where in Chicago? South side of Chicago, very near the university. They’re cheeked by Jao, the worst black slums in Chicago, very close to the University of Chicago. You have to say, I know this might strike you as objectionable or controversial. Some of these places are pretty close to barbarism. And this is the point, Bellow and to a lesser extent Roth, make that something terrible has happened to some of the great American cities. And I know this does not chime with our times with the world of Black Lives Matter, and Yes We Can and so on. But Bellow felt that was the truth. That was the true story of what had happened to American cities. And Roth thought that too.
iPad 178. “The irony that all the characters in "The Graduate” film are Jewish. The novel on which it’s based, they are not. Hoffman asked Nichols if he was sure about casting him because he had read the novel. There’s an excellent book on the making of “The Graduate”.“ Oh, sorry, this is from Judy Gorman. Yes, it is a great story about the making of "The Graduate”. You are absolutely right. That image at the beginning of Dustin Hoffman is just one moment in this story of how this group of Jews, Mike Nichols, the director, the writer, Buck Henry, the actor, Dustin Hoffman, the composers of the soundtrack, Simon Garfunkel, you know, it was one of those moments along with “Funny Girl”, along with “The Fiddle on the Roof”, where Jews broke into the mainstream in movies on their own terms. And it, you’re right, Judy, it is a great story. Not just “The Graduate” itself, but the making of the film and the Judaization of the film.
Q: Paula Green, “What about Isaac Bashevis Singer? I devoured his work in the sixties and seventies.” A: Yes! I wouldn’t really call him a Jewish American writer, however, he is essentially a Polish Yiddish writer who happened to end up in America, along with his brother, IJ Singer. Just as their sister, also a novelist, Esther Kreitzman ended up in London. So I, that’s why Singer is not in this course. I have given talks about him before and I hope I will do again. It’s not out of disrespect. I’m a great Singer fan. However, he’s not a Jewish American writer and did not write in English. And Bellow interestingly, was the person who first brought him into the mainstream by translating “Gimpel the Fool” for “Partisan Review”. He sat down at a table and translated it. And Irving Howell writes a wonderful description of that.
Carol Stock, thank you for your very kind words. Monty’s iPad. “To Jerusalem and Back” by Saul Bellow’s an interesting read. Absolutely it is. And that’s part, sorry, I should have added that to the list of things of significance to do with Israel and the Jewish American writers that, you know, Bellow wrote about, wrote a book “To Jerusalem and Back”, which is kind of, it’s not fiction, it’s a nonfiction account of his encounter with Jerusalem and Israel in the 1970s. Ron’s iPhone 12. “Another major Jewish figure on American TV, Milton Bur.” Absolutely, those incredible cigars. “Others in the sixties, Jackie Mason”, certainly. “Don Rickles”, yes. “Jack Benny”, absolutely. “Marx Brothers, George Burns, Buddy Hackett, and of course many more.” That’s a great list, Ron’s iPhone 12. Thank you very much for sharing that. Yeah, absolutely right. Lorna Sandler. “Nice to get a reminder of these iconic writers also performers, who figured in my past some clips and/OR portraits would’ve been an even better reminder.” YouTube, my friend, YouTube. “Waited 30 minutes of listening for quotes to come on. PS love the series "Old Jews Telling Jokes”, by the way. Hilarious.“ Thank you. Ruth Book.
Q: "How do you account for the popularity of these Jewish writers and actors to the American public?” A: Now there’s a good question. That’s a very good question, Ruth. Because of course, the point was they weren’t popular, they were marginal, they were not in the mainstream. And I think it was partly the way they had their finger on the pulse is what I was trying to say in the fifties and sixties and seventies. The way the mood in America changed from conservative, rural, middle America, that was no longer where the action was. It was no good making TV shows like “Bonanza” or “High Chaparral” anymore. The mood during the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement, in particular those two moments, really changed America. It became open to a new satirical, mocking kind of voice. And boy did it get it with people like Philip Roth, Woody Allen, and many of the names we’ve been talking about. People wanted a different kind of humour. They wanted something less Johnny Carson and more, you know, going back to some of these wonderful names that we were given earlier. So I think that’s the way I’d account for it. They somehow caught the moment in a way that Seinfeld and Larry David and other comedians and writers did later on.
Rita. “Many thanks from…” Oh, thank you. Thank you very much for your kind words. “Many were Canadian.”, Alice says. Anandy Bellow was Canadian born, well, sort of Canadian, born in Montreal. Shelly Shapiro. “Brought up as a religious Jewish girl in a small Midwestern US town in the sixties and none of these writers touched upon my world. Their world and concerns were alien to me. The only one I could connect with was Malamud’s, "The Fixer”. Nothing religious, nothing female.“ Well, there, I mentioned at times, Shelly, you make a very important point here, nothing female. Bellow and Roth have come in for a huge kicking in recent years and how their reputations will survive, this remains to be seen. That they don’t speak to women readers in the way they speak to male readers. And there is more than a touch of misogyny, more than a touch of sexism in the way they write about women. Those two in particular. And you could say Heller, as well. And you could certainly say Mailer, as well. So you know, you are absolutely right. This is a criticism frequently made by women readers, smart women readers who say, actually, you know, this doesn’t touch me. This doesn’t speak to me. Give me Cynthia Ozick, give me Joan Didion, give me… temporarily forgotten the name of that wonderful woman, screenwriter. Her name will come back to me. Anyway, yes, absolutely right. It’s no doubt. But of course, they grew up in a world and thrived in a world of male agents, male publishers, male critics. Cynthia Ozick wrote a wonderful description of attending Lionel Trilling’s graduate seminar at Columbia University in the, just after the war, where there were only two women and Trilling constantly and presumably deliberately mixed their names up. Yeah, you are absolutely right, Shelly. Thank you for that very important point.
Q: "What about Mordecai Richler?” Anita Schwartzberg asks. A: There’s a great Canadian Jewish writer. Forgive me, but you know, again, you just have to cut the cake in whichever way you think works. Perhaps one day I’ll do a course on Canadian Jewish writers. George Hogan and Olga Vice.
Q: Olga, “Was there a general reaction in the sixties and seventies, to the fact that the best writers were Jewish?” A: Well, of course not all the best writers, one should say, in fairness. John Updike, for example. Tennessee Williams was still a very prolific writer during the sixties. So not all were, but I guess what struck me was this new kind of Jewish American voice and the reputations of many of these writers. Bear in mind my age, I’m aged beyond words. And when I was young, people like Heller and Mailer were still very, very famous and highly thought of, perhaps less so now. And as I say, Bellow and Roth, also less so now. So we shall see what happens in the coming years.
Sandra Landau, “Mordecai Richler, although Canadian, fits right in there with insight and hilarity.” Absolutely right. “The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz” to enable one. “So these strong groups of creatives over the years have dissipated.” No, they haven’t. There’s been a fantastic revival of Jewish American writing. I mentioned some names last week. Jonathan Safran Foer, “Everything’s Illuminated”. Nicole Krauss, “The History of Love”. Nathan Englander. There have been… Oh Lord. It’s, the names will come back to me later. In the middle of the night I’ll wake up and then go, oh God, why didn’t I remember that novel about Yiddish speaking Jews in Alaska? Anyway, yeah, no, you’re right. They did. That generation passed, but another terrific generation came along. Whether they’re as good is another matter, but they’re a terrific generation in their own right.
Andre Shaw, oh, thank you very much for your kind words. “Female writer, Margaret Edward.” Absolutely. Thank you, Sandy Weisser. “I loved all those writers.”, Angela says. Yes. Great writer, Nora Efron. Thank you. Bless you, Monty’s iPads. Nora Efron, how could I forget Nora Efron’s name? You are absolutely right. Of course. Great, great writer, memoirist, screenwriter, possibly the great, one of the great screenwriters. I must go. I’m sorry. I’m sorry to those who I haven’t been able to get back to, my apologies. It has been a pleasure and a delight as always reading your fascinating questions and being reminded of all these great names.
Thank you and see you next week, 7 till 8, a bit later on than tonight or last week. So I look forward to seeing you then. Thank you so much.